Masters of Disguise
by Cruelest Sea
Summary: Character studies of Paris and Rollin, the men behind the masks. One shots: Master Of Disguise; The Distance.
1. Master Of Disguise

**_Master Of Disguise_**

_"We all wear masks, and the time comes when we cannot remove them without removing some of our own skin." - André Berthiaume_

His given name is Paris. Paris and nothing more, as if five letters are enough to represent him, this stranger in their midst. It's all he offers and they don't question. After all, names matter little in this line of work and can easily be changed.

He doesn't ask about the agent he replaced, and they never tell him. Dead, retired, he never knows. After a while they stop looking at him with that faraway gaze or biting off a name before the second syllable. It doesn't matter to him either way.

There's something dark in the flash of his eyes and the set of his mouth, a strangeness not present in the other's. They see it, watch it for a sign of weakness.

There's a fatal flaw within him, they know, the ability to feel. It dooms him from the first mission, sets him apart from the others.

He flinches when the first man dies, a corrupt leader who would probably have been killed by his own men sooner or later anyway. But it wasn't later, it was now, and all because they set him up for the fall. He covers the flinch with a quick shrug but not before the Leader's eyes bore into him.

oooOOOooo

He's played dozens of parts by now, old and young, kings and the poorest of the poor. Tonight he is somewhere between it all, portraying a man he's never met, a man destined to die before he changes back to his own face.

He streaks the gray lines through his hair like an artist painting a canvas, each line representing years in the life of the man he must play tonight. It's ironic in many ways, as tonight will bring an end to those years for the man who lived them, and he himself will no doubt never live to have gray in his hair.

A muscle in his jaw jumps and his fingers tighten around the brush. He takes a deep breath and returns to working on his disguise. It must be perfect down to the last detail. A single hair out of place, a single wrong move, and his life is over.

oooOOOooo

The fist slams into his cheek again and he closes his eyes against the pain. His face is already painted in livid purple but he can't scream, can't even speak. He has to hold out another fifteen minutes, long enough to give the others time to make it inside.

No one will notice or mention his sacrifice, he's only a name disavowed and written off.

He's curled up in a fetal position when they find him, gently lift him and carry him out between them, his head rolled forward sickeningly. They say nothing as they tend to him, and he keeps his eyes closed. He's afraid to open them, afraid that he'll look at their unbruised faces and fall apart, start screaming in anger.

If he had opened his eyes he might have seen the sorrow on the Leader's face.

oooOOOooo

The first scar is a thin white line etched into his skin below the hairline, the only mark left from the bomb's explosion. It's a small scar but he reaches for the makeup to cover it. It could identify him under cover someday and cost him his life. Even this tiny scar can't be part of his own face. In truth he no longer knows what his real face looks like.

All he knows now is deception and countless deaths, hundreds now on his hands, on his heart. Evil men, but still men, bloodstains all over him. His world is magic tricks and masks, black shrouds and never ending nightmares. He bargained for it, he tells himself, sold his soul for a greater good.

But the ache never leaves, the pain concealed behind a new identity and another man's face.

oooOOOooo

It's a simple assignment of taking down a traitor, a woman prepared to sell all she knows to their enemies.

He's charmed her, won her confidence over the past week, won her away from the husband who loves her and knows nothing of her activities.

They're sitting in a quiet, discreet restaurant, hands joined across the table, candlelight flickering off their eyes.

It's halfway through the meal when she leans close and kisses him, whispering how beautiful his blue eyes are, that his heart clenches and rips inside him until he thinks he can't bear another moment. But he holds out anyway.

Later, much later, when she lies dead by her husband's hand and he's made his escape he goes into the back room and washes her blood off his hands, jerks the contacts from his eyes and tosses them into their case.

He lifts his face to the mirror above him, stares back into the dark and hollow eyes set deep into his face.

When the others have gone he lowers his head onto the case and sobs until he has no tears left, fists slamming against the mirror in quiet rage.

In the morning he's back with them, eyes dry, face set in hard and unreadable stone. And if the others notice that his eyes seem a bit red they never comment.

oooOOOooo

The last mask he wears is red and it's his own blood running down the side of his head and dripping steadily into his eyes. He's curled up in the darkness, back against one side of the tunnel, knees drawn up to the other. It's too black to see his hand in front of his face and he doesn't even know it's his last performance until he's choking on the dust and grime left behind by the explosion.

He always wondered how death would come and now he knows - quiet, silent, a lonely, faceless stranger born out of blackness as dark as the soul he once had.

He's sinking into the darkness when a pair of hands wrap around him and an oxygen mask comes down across his mouth, fresh, clean air expanding his lungs. He gasps for that air like a drowning man clutching at straws, like a man clinging to life out of habit rather than desire.

A murmur of voices swirl around him as a larger set of hands come underneath him and gather him up, sliding him out of the tunnel and away from the darkness.

He opens his eyes into the harsh light of a hospital room, to the faces surrounding him, once strangers, now the only family, the only friends he has, if he could still afford friends in this line of work.

His hands come up slowly, touch the bandages covering half of his face. He asks, voice toneless and stiff. They tell him it's from the surgery. That side of his face was cut to ribbons. More surgery will correct it, will give him a new face.

He laughs, a hollow sound that echoes eerily in the room. He laughs until his shoulders heave, and his hands dig into the bandages. And sometime later on the laughter turns to quiet weeping.


	2. The Distance

**The Distance**

_"I was never one to patiently pick up broken fragments and glue them together again and tell myself that the mended whole was as good as new. What is broken is broken - and I'd rather remember it as it was at its best than mend it and see the broken places as long as I lived."-Margaret Mitchell_

He would have thought by now he'd be used to pain.

He's been shot, stabbed, even tortured before, brushed against death too many times to count.

And yet watching her, the distance between them like an empty sea, is more pain than everything he's endured before.

He sees her across the room, draped in satin as stormy grey as her eyes. A man holds her arm, his touch loose as if he wouldn't care if someone stepped in and pulled her away. He'd known she married twice, divorced twice.

There's a champagne glass clenched in her hand, her fingers white around the slender goblet. Any tighter and the glass will shatter.

She doesn't look his way and it almost frightens him to think she might look and not know him. He's changed. Too many drinks on lonely nights, too many missed meals, and hard living have left him with a gaunt, ill look. Many of the scars are new, as well, so many more than when he last saw her. The thick one, corded to the right of his heart, was only a stitched wound then.

He studies her face, the lines that age has put there and yet somehow made her all the more beautiful.

Only her eyes have changed, faded and washed out like the tide ebbing from the sea.

He remembers when her eyes were afire with life, filled with dreams. He'd killed that fire, banked it with their last mission together, the capture of a defecting agent they'd somehow bungled.

They'd carried him back that day, the bullet lodged in his lung, his blood spilling over onto his friends' clothes, her hand covering the wound, keeping him alive.

He wasn't expected to live then, not with so much damage.

But he'd beaten the odds, fought for life, fought to breathe on his own again, while through it all she never left his side, his limp hand held tightly in her's.

But when he opened his eyes for the first time since that day he'd seen the change in her. She was distant, quiet. And he knew that everything had changed, broken into a thousand pieces he couldn't paste back together.

She couldn't stay, couldn't watch him die bit by bit until one day they'd close the coffin and he'd be gone.

She couldn't marry him.

And so the day he took his first steps on his own she'd walked away, slipped out of his life as if she'd never existed at all.

He'd moved on, of course. A new job, more dangerous work, and he'd put his former life behind him.

But he'd watched her from a distance over the years, followed her through fashion magazines, and tabloids, watched as she passed through two marriages and the sizable wealth that dissolved them. He'd learned the parties she attended, the circle of friends she'd made.

But he'd never seen her until tonight.

Her head lifts, almost as if sensing someone there, turns his direction.

Her eyes meet his, flicker like a fading candle. He sees the recognition in the sudden tears that start to her eyes, the emotion she's faked so many years and yet always was real with him.

Her eyes shimmer, fluttering through the past like a hand turning a book, tears washing away the years as he takes the first step toward her.

And as long as he can see those tears, he can believe there's still a chance to start over.


End file.
